What I love about working with teenagers is being able to see them grow over time, or even just over the course of a conversation. My kids’ willingness to just blurt things out means I’m hearing their thoughts—and sometimes I really don’t need to (“Miss Camille, I gotta go take a huge doo-doo”, Great, thanks for sharing), but often that means I’m getting insight on how they’re figuring things out.

So my zine class this session is mostly this crew of younger girls of color who are some of the most bad-ass women I have met in my life under any circumstances, like they know I am their biggest cheerleader and intentionally get them riled up about sexism and racism so we can yell and call people on their bullshit and hopefully make something creative out of our yelling. Then there’s two boys who I’ve worked with really closely since last year who have a tendency to yell about everything whether or not they really have a sense of what they’re talking about.

I showed them the video Walking Home about street harassment, because most of the girls are writing about judgment of teenage girls, body image, weight, sexual harassment, etc. They all started arguing, first along the lines of “Guys always do blah blah blah,” “Girls always do blah blah blah” that was too general to be productive and was just getting everyone mad at each other. So I made a rule that we had to talk from experience (their teachers stress being able to use text evidence in essays and responses, so that was how I framed it but where their lives were the text) and we started getting more productive.

The girls all started sharing stories about street harassment, but the boys stayed defensive so I asked them to talk about why the conversation bothered them. At first they were saying they didn’t want to talk about sexual harassment, but then it turned out that they really didn’t want to be associated with dudes who harass women and that they were responding to being lumped in with sleazy dudes. So I asked them what they do to not be jerks like that, and they were really adamant about thinking it’s fucked up how a lot of guys treat girls.

THIS IS THE SUPER RAD PART: One of them shared a story about one of those exercises where everyone steps forward if some question is true (like an ice-breaker exercise), that he remembered from several years ago, where every single girl stepped forward for a question about having been harassed by strangers in public, and he told us all how much that stuck with him and made him realize how seriously all the women around him have to deal with harassment. He then announced, “One of the things that I hate the most is domestic violence,” and started talking about his community intervening in a domestic violence situation. So I brought the conversation back to make sure everyone caught that connection, one that many adults fail to make, that street harassment and domestic violence are related and that there is a whole spectrum of ways women, and especially women of color, have to fight for ownership of their own bodies. I asked them about what they can do as dudes to support the girls and women around them, and they talked about calling out other guys for harassing girls and being willing to fight (physically and non-physically) if need be to get guys to cut out sexist behavior. Those boys might now be teaming up to make a comic about that realization of how the girls around them are treated by men.

It was awesome to see them move from defensiveness to anger to creativity over the course of about 10 minutes. We all got heated, like kids were shouting at each other and getting mad at me too. And I loved it. Cause it isn’t often that class is a space you can bring in your own life as your text, or feel compelled to start yelling about the subject, or can express that much emotion, so I felt like maybe I’m starting to do this all right. Mostly I was excited to see how much they were willing to share with each other, both their experiences and their emotion and energy and ideas. Instead of being competitive with what they’re working on, we’re making plans to collaborate or let their zines converse with one another. They’re making plans already to distribute their zines around the school, or make posters to put up, and most of them haven’t even written much yet. They were already going, “We need a campaign against sexism!”, “Let’s protest harassment!” so we’re going to start with what they’re writing and finding ways to spread those ideas they’re heated about around the school.

So I don’t even have words for how cool they all are. Like, nothing I could say is gonna cut it.

After school I worked with some freshmen to start putting on paper the things they don’t like about the school, like structural things that the administration and teachers could change. Things like certain actions of teachers that make students feel disrespected and untrusted. They yelled and I took notes, and we told the principal that we will be handing her a manifesto sometime soon (can I coin the word “FRESHMANIFESTO”?), and they even threatened a flash mob in her office. Among many brilliant things they brought up, I had never before thought about the relationship between body image of girls of color and school dress codes. Like I’d had conversations with girls of color before where they’ve said that girls who are more curvy (and almost always black and/or latina) are more likely to get in trouble for dress code violations or perceived violations. But today they pointed out how sometimes wearing something like leggings is a celebration of finally feeling okay with your body and your black-girl-curvy-fullness, and it feels fucked up to then get disciplined for breaking the dress code but seeing skinny flat white girls not getting in trouble for wearing the same thing.

In conclusion, they are the shit. And this is me saying that after two 10-hour days in a row.

so-treu:

i need you to come to terms with the way white women have facilitated some of the most unspeakable violence upon black and brown and indigenous people, bodies, and community. often in the name of white womanhood. often in the name of freedom. often in the name of feminism.

i need you to understand that you killed Emmitt Till. i need you to think about all of the black men and boys that have been murdered because either you accused them or your men took it upon themselves to defend *your* honor. i need you to look at pictures of lynched bodies and think about what role you played in it.

i need you to know the names of the women raped by U.S. military in countries we invaded, in part because feminists said we needed to save the women and/or children and supported the various invasions.

i need you to know that those reproductive rights you all are up in arms about were created via the destruction and maiming of black and brown bodies. i need you to know who Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy are, and what was done to them. i need you to know the names of the Puerto Rican women who were lied to and who died so that The Pill could bring you your precious sexual liberation. i need you to know the central role white women played in sterilization programs that targeted black women, poor women, anyone they deemed too “feeble” to procreate. i need you to think about why more big name feminist organizations are up in arms about the most recent kick up about contraception than about sterilized black women getting compensated for what was done to them.

i need you to understand that at this point, it’s not about privilege. it’s not about you being able to find products that work with your hair no matter where you go. it’s about people’s lives. it’s about WOC lives and a centuries old disregard white women have shown for them. it’s about that fact that white women have been an active agent in the destruction of our communities, our histories, and our families. for centuries.

and WOC don’t owe you a damn thing. not. one. thing.

so get that through your skulls then maybe we can work together. maybe.

I can’t believe there are white feminists who can talk about Sisterhood out one side of their mouths, and then get up in arms about a statement like this out the other side.

It seems to me like studying history would make you a good feminist, no? So why the refusal to acknowledge the less pretty parts of that history? (When was the last time you think I, a black woman, picked up a standard US history textbook and found pretty things about myself that made me feel good about myself?)

When it comes down to it, what I understand least is how white feminists can respond to a statement like this by selling themselves so short. Someone wants to talk about the role of white women in the histories of lynching, and you refuse to engage? Those are historical facts; how can you possibly benefit from pretending it isn’t true? Emmett Till was lynched because white men thought white women so fragile that a woman couldn’t even be whistled at by a black 14 year old boy; how does it speak to your strength if you then refuse to fight against that?

But in the meantime, there is plenty that I feel amazing about being built by people of color. Y’all probably haven’t noticed (at least til it becomes tokenizable and trendy). If you want to be a real ally to people of color, make it happen. Put in that work. But we have things to build and no time to just wait around for you.

leonineantiheroine:

excentricyoruba:

leonineantiheroine:

femmenoire:

leonineantiheroine:

liquornspice:

poemsofthedead:

pssincerelyadventure:

See here…..

My mostly white women and gender studies class, after reading the Combahee River Collective, wanted to know if they could be Black Feminists because they cared about all those issues and wanted to end oppression and liberate women etc..

I said no. I stand by no. Mainly because, I believe it was Patricia Hill Collins, had a valid point. Black Feminism is grounded in the experience of being black. It’s why the movement varies from other feminism movements in that black feminists wish to work alongside our black brothers BECAUSE it is all the same fight.

Then people had a problem with the fact that black feminism exists at all because why racialize the movement, it tears people apart…

No, the first couple of waves tore people apart by not addressing our issues as women of color and being so limited in class aspects as well.

Also why I don’t ID as a womanist even though I am very fond of Alice Walker and completely believe in her vision (not that I don’t have other critiques of her also) of what womanism means/is. I just feel like it is something that is specific to Black experience. As much as I agree with it, honor it, love it, I don’t feel comfortable using it to describe my experience as a non-Black but First Nations & Muslim person.

(And before anyone asks, no, I do NOT ID as a feminist either. Ever. For reasons.)

Idk, I feel like, as a box of tools/theories one can use…I don’t see why anyone couldn’t id as Black Feminist? I think you can center Black Feminist analysis without being Black.

I feel a little differently about the term Womanism, but idk why.

I have not at all read enough Black Feminist writings to really say tho. I’m anxious to see what folks who’ve read/studied Black Feminisms think?

Only Black women can ID as Black feminists because Black feminism was created by and for Black women as a necessary movement/action/way of thinking because feminism often shit on Black women; same with womanism.  

Identification is different from supporting or utilising the tools built by Black feminists or by anyone who is oppressed within a social movement. And to utilise the tools, one who doesn’t belong to that group—has to be careful that one isn’t using those tools for one’s own purposes which may further marginalise the oppressed group.

The ID is different from quoting or centering Black women when it comes to gender/race issues. Identification is overrated shit a lot of time. 

This is actually historically dependent. 

In the U.S. Black feminist actually just meant “non white” throughout the 1970s. It’s not until the 1980s when those early woc start articulating their definitions of feminism (as positioned next to White women) that became more specific to their races. 

Also, in England in the 1970s-1980s Black feminism meant West Indian, African and Asian women.

So, I actually could understand or relate to non-Black women of color identifying as Black feminists. 

But there was a push from some Asian folks in the UK for example to stop identifying as Black from the ’90s. I think you’re right as in early woc whatever, but I don’t really follow feminist history in that way. I think that form of feminist historiography is driven by whiteness. Like what about Sojourner Truth? I mean I know engagement with Truth for example is retroactively defined. I just think there is a theory and practice of oh non-Black WOC have defined themselves as Black, but that anti-Blackness is really intense from everyone who is non-Black so like I get my hackles up when non-Black people want to define themselves as Black even in relation to feminism.  

eta: but of course if anyone who is a non-Black WOC and who has contributed to Black feminism as historically defined and not shat on Black women then that is Black feminism…but what about now? 

This is really interesting because only recently I started trying to be part of Black feminist groups in London. And in the meetings, in the workshops on Black feminism, there were always be Asian women who identified as Black feminists. I found this fascinating because I’d never heard of such previously.

cool. obviously I’m a little bit mean: ‘BLACK FEMINISMS FOR BLACK WOMEN!’, lol. Oh yeah and I’m not down with it over where I am; I don’t even believe in interracial coalition work at the moment—although I can support what other WOC/POC groups do.

How do you all see Black feminism? xx

by Rowland Túpac Keshena

For those who don’t know much about me, I am a currently studying for a Masters Degree in Public Issues Anthropology, specializing in a Fanon and MLM infused analysis of revolutionary Native nationalist and anti-colonialist movements in North Amerika. I also have really strong interrelated interests in revolutionary critical pedagogy, the “reindigenization” of the Chicano community and movement and, the subject of this post, indigenous feminism. Anyway, one of the perks of my program is that I can create my own courses, and I’ve taken such a route this semester by creating my own directed studies course in indigenous feminist theory.

The growth of indigenous feminism is, for me, a huge interest, both personal and academic, not just because of the obvious importance struggling against both white supremacist (ne0)colonial capitalism and hetero-patriarchy if we want to achieve meaningful freedom, justice and equality, but also because for a long time the status quo within our movement was that you could not be both a feminist and a native warrior. On the one hand we are not Native enough if we call ourselves and our movement feminist, but on the other we are not feminist enough for the whitestream feminists since we pointing out that the whitestream movement does not take us, and our unique experiences and struggles into account. I am indigenous man and I find this to be one of the greatest failings of our movement, and for that reason I wholeheartedly endorse, support and promote the rise of an indigenous feminism.

Anyway, with that in mind and in the spirit of sharing ideas, and radical education I’ve decided to post my reading list for others to take a look a lot, critique and/or otherwise contribute their thoughts. It’s made up of a mix of books and articles, both academic and non-academic, which are available on line.

Books:

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, edited by Joyce Green

I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism, by Lee Maracle

From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, by Haunani-Kay Trask

Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, by Andrea Smith

Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, by Eileen Morton-Robinson

Online Articles:

Indigenous Feminism Without Apology, by Andrea Smith

Jennifer Nez Denetdale on Indigenous Feminisms

An Indigenous Perspective on Feminism, Militarism, and the Environment, by Winona LaDuke

Zapatismo and the Emergence of Indigenous Feminism, by Aida Hernandez Castillo

Academic Journal Publications:

Wicazo Sa Review “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Indigenous Sovereignties,” guest edited by Mishuana R. Goeman and Jennifer Nez Denetdale

Whiteness Matters: Implications of Talking Up to the White Woman, by Eileen Morton-Robinson

Race, Tribal Nation, and Gender: A Native Feminist Approach to Belonging, by Renya Ramirez

Introduction: Special Issue on Native American Women, Feminism, and Indigenism, by Anne Waters

Patriarchal Colonialism and Indigenism: Implications for Native Feminist Spirituality and Native Womanism, by M. A. Jaimes Guerrero

Dismantling the Master’s Tools with the Master’s House: Native Feminist Liberation Theologies, by Andrea Smith

oh my gods yes. This reading list is amazing.

parasaakin:

Among Chicanas/méxicanas, haciendo caras, “making faces,” means to put on a face, express feelings by distorting the face — frowning, grimacing, looking sad, glum or disapproving. For me, haciendo caras has the added connotation of making gestos subversive gestures, the piercing look that questions or challenges, the look that says, “don’t walk all over me,” the one that says, “Get out of my face.” “Face” is the surface of the body that is the most noticeably inscribed by social structures, marked with instructions on how to be mujer, macho, working class, Chicana. As mestizas — biologically and/or culturally mixed — we have different surfaces for each aspect of identity, each inscribed by a particular subculture. We are “written” all over, or should I say, carved and tattooed with the sharp needles of experience.

The world knows us by our faces, the most naked, most vulnerable, exposed and significant topography of the body. When our caras do not live up to the “image” that the family or community wants us to wear and when we rebel against the engraving of our bodies, we experience ostracism, alienation, isolation and shame. Since white AngloAmericans’ racist idealogy cannot take in our faces, it, too, covers them up, “blanks” them out of its reality. To become less vulnerable to all these oppressors, we have had to “change” faces, hemos tenido que cambiar caras “como el cambio de color en el camaleón — cuando los peligros son muchos y las opciones son pocas.” Some of us are forced to acquire the ability, lie a chameleon, to change color when the dangers are many and options few. Some of us who already “wear many changes/inside of our skin” (Audre Lorde) have been force to adopt a face that would pass.

The masks, las máscaras, we are compelled to wear, drive a wedge between our intersubjective personhood and the persona we present to the world. “Over my mask/is your mask of me.” (Mitsuye Yamada) These masking roles exact a toll. “My mask is control/concealment/endurance/my mask is escape/from my/self.” “We are all bleeding, rubbed raw behind our masks.” After years of wearing masks we may become just a series of roles, the constellated self limping along with its broken limbs.

In sewing terms, “interfacing” means sewing a piece of material between two pieces of fabric to provide support and stability to collar, cuff, yoke. Between the masks we’ve internalized, one on top of another, are our interfaces. The masks are already steeped with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is the place — the interface — between the masks that provides the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks.

—— Haciendo caras, una entrada - An introduction by Gloria Anzaldúa. From Making Face, Making Soul.

(via dancingonembers-deactivated2011)

fuckyeahchicanawriters:

I found that this little community of feminist writers in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, this Feminist Writers’ Guild, was very much excluding women of color. Most of the white women I knew were part of that orga­nization. …

Every two weeks we would have our meetings and everybody would talk about the white problems and their white experiences. When it was my turn to talk, it was almost like they were putting words into my mouth. They interrupted me while I was still talking or, after I had finished, they inter­preted what I just said according to their thoughts and ideas.

They thought that all women were oppressed in the same way, and they tried to force me to accept their image of me and my experiences. They were not willing to be open to my own pre­sentation of myself and to accept that I might be different from what they had thought of me so far.

…They didn’t understand what we were going through. They wanted to speak for us because they had an idea of what feminism was, and they wanted to apply their notion of feminism across all cultures. This Bridge Called My Back, there­fore, was my sweeping back against that kind of “All of us are women so you are all included and we were all equal.” Their idea was that we all were cultureless because we were feminists; we didn’t have any other culture. But they never left their white­ness at home. Their whiteness covered everything they said. However, they wanted me to give up my Chicananess and become part of them; I was asked to leave my race at the door.

Interview with Gloria Anzaldua by Karin Ikas

AMEN. I’d be excited to read this whole interview, I’ll look it up.

(via atapestryofdisasters-deactivate)

makingsoul:

from Cherríe Moraga’s “La Güera”:

I have many times questioned my right to even work on an anthology which is to be written “exclusively by Third World women.” I have had to look critically at my claim to color, at a time when, among white feminist ranks, it is a “politically correct” (and sometimes peripherally advantageous) assertion to make. I must acknowledge the fact that, physically, I have had a choice about making that claim, in contrast to women who have not had such a choice, and have been abused for their color. I must reckon with the fact that for most of my life, by virtue of the very fact that I am white-looking, I identified with and aspired toward white values, and that I rode the wave of that Southern Californian privilege as far as conscience would let me.

I think: what is my responsibility to my roots – both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English? I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.

silentbeep:

Ana Castillo, Xicanisma (1994) 

“The people from whom I descend as a Chicana, are mestizo/as.  Our history is inextricably tied to United States history because of the Mexican-American war whereby half of Mexico’s territory was appropriated by the United States over one hundred fifty years ago. 

As a poet, writer, and educator, my own educational process led me to accommodate Paulo Freire’s philosophy to my status as a mestiza in the United States.  I will add that as a Chicana, my process has not been singular but indeed one shared collectively by Latino/a activists.  Paulo Freire’s significant book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was not recommended to me by chance.  His work was enormously popular among Latino/a activists in the seventies.  The concept of the conscientización process was initially intended for all poor people. 

By the beginning of the new decade, however, many Chicana/Latina activists, disenchanted, if not simply worn down, by male-dominated Chicano/Latino politics, began to develop our own theories of oppression.  Compounding our social dilemmas related to class and race were gender and sexuality.  For the brown woman the term feminism was and continues to be inseparably linked with white women of middle-and upper-class background. (This is also the case, by and large, in México.)  Feminism, therefore, is perhaps not a term embraced by most women who might be inclined to define themselves as Chicanas and who, in practice, have goals and beliefs found in feminist politics.  Therefore, I use the term conscientización as it has been applied among Spanish-speaking women activists. 

Along those same lines, many women of Mexican descent in the nineties do not apply the term Chicana to themselves seeing it as an outdated expression weighed down by the particular radicalism of the seventies.  The search for a term which would appeal to the majority of women of Mexican descent who are also concerned with the social and political ramifications of living in a hierarchical society has been frustrating.  In this text I have chosen the ethnic and racial definition of Mexic Amerindian to assert both our indigenous blood and the source, at least in part, of our spirituality. 

I also use interchangeably the term mestiza, which has been used among Mexican intellectuals as a point of reference regarding our social status since the Mexican colonial period.  When discussing Mexican culture and traditions, I may use mejicana for both nationals and women born in the U.S.  When discussing activism I often use Chicano/a.  I introduce here the word, Xicanisma, a term that I will use to refer to the concept of Chicana feminism.  In recent years the idea of Chicana feminism has been taken up by the academic community where I believe it has fallen prey to theoretical abstractions.  Eventually I hope that we can rescue Xicanisma from the suffocating atmosphere of conference rooms, the acrobatics of academic terms and concepts and carry it out to our work place, social gatherings, kitchens, bedrooms, and society in general.”  (Castillo, Introduction, 10-11) 

From Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, New York:  Plume/Penguin Books, 1994

http://www.chicanas.com/defs.html

Reading this right now. New Haven’s libraries are awesome but one of my very few complaints is the lack of Ana Castillo, so I haven’t read nearly as much of her work as I’d like to.

(via fuckyeahchicanawriters)

Amazing list of resources compiled by Jessica Yee of the Native Youth Sexual Health Project about indigenous feminisms. The link to the Andrea Smith article listed is broken; I’m trying to find it & read it right now.

ETA: Got it! Andrea Smith, Indigenous Feminism without Apology - Decentering white feminism

xicanagrrrl:

erespielmorena:

revolutionaryhips:

i need to read every single book on this list

y muy que reteke pronto!

omg, this could not have come at a more perfect time. now, to get my hands on these without money or a university ID card.

(via bigbadcolored-deactivated201104)

This & the previous post are short essays from my zine Readin & Fightin #2

* Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde

* Woman Hollering Creek, Sandra Cisneros

* Colonize This!, ed. Daisy Hernandez & Bushra Rehman

There are a few book I can always fall back on. When I’m looking for a nugget of brilliance or perfect framing of an idea, when I want to read something I know will be smart and satisfying, when I need validation that I say things worth saying even if I feel like the world is stacked against me, these are the books I go to for comfort food or pick up at the library just to skim the table of contents and be grateful that those ideas were committed to paper.

The first book I read and finished as soon as I took my last college final, after 4 years of resenting reading, was Colonize This!, an anthology of personal essays by young women of color about feminism. Part of what’s interesting about the essays is that, with a few exceptions, most of the women are not widely known outside their communities or already published. Each woman writes about some aspect of her experiences with feminism—being ignored or dismissed by white feminists, making spaces for working-class women’s concerns within feminism, rejecting feminism outright for its shortcomings (or sticking with it in spite of them), linking feminist consciousness with hip-hop, punk, spoken word, and dance communities. Overall the book is an array of the many ways feminism, womanism, and similar frameworks can manifest themselves, the many ways women of color fight to make spaces for ourselves and our communities to be healthy, creative, nurtured, and respected.

Many essays have realizations that the authors have always been in feminist communities—that is, women in their communities have always had to fight for basic needs and the survival of their families and neighbors—but no one ever used the label of feminism. These women were all too busy trying to maintain to spend time theorizing their actions or “raising consciousness” in an academic way.

Sister Outsider, a collection of essays by Audre Lorde, is the book I turn to all the time for pearls of wisdom. (I hear people revere the bible in the same way?) Audre Lorde, self-described as a “Black woman warrior poet doing my work,” takes the complicated things that happen in daily life, the systems that w undermine and subvert to stay okay, picks them up and lays them out bare. In the essay “Man Child,” she discusses the challenges and bumps of being in an interracial lesbian partnership and raising a black teenaged son. In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” the keynote speech of the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association conference, she lays out a quick, solid definition of racism and then of the anger it brings up in her. She then applies these definitions point-blank to the actions of some of those very conference attendees and their colleagues within academic women’s studies. She urges women to feel honest anger in response to racism as they do to sexism, and then to make use of that anger, “for anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.”

All the essays in the book are brilliant, all have one-line punches that I’ve copied into notebooks or surrounded with stars, but maybe the hardest hitter is the dense “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” This essay is on my kitchen table and in the back of my mind often. It is basically an exploration of the power of sexual energy, of reclaiming one’s body despite traumas and battles that may have been inflicted upon it, and of turning the body-shame and fear instilled in us, especially women and/or queer people of color, into channeled, productive anger. A friend of mine first decided that it would not be shameful and unchristian of her to have sex with someone she loved after reading this essay and letting it marinate.

Woman Hollering Creek, a collection of short stories by Sandra Cisneros, is for me the fiction complement to these two books of essays. Among the stories there is a wide range of voices, mostly first-person narration from Chicana women who navigate the US-Mexico border and other arbitrary boundaries. One thing I like about these stories is the inconsistencies Cisneros allows her narrators. These are women who admit to their bad habits, who laugh at the complexes and insecurities their mothers taught them, who own their shortcomings. So the teenaged narrator of “My Tocaya” stays self-centeredly angry at her missing classmate for messing up her love pursuits, responding with growing resentment instead of sympathy as the girl is presumed dead and their school mourns its loss. In the end “she couldn’t even die right,” and the narrator concludes with just, “Girl, I’m telling you.”

Likewise, the narrator of “Never Marry a Mexican” begins with a refusal that she will ever marry, because all the men she’s “borrowed” from the confines of their marriages have disappointed her, and she is too romantic to “trust [a husband] to love the way I’ve loved.” When the narrator of “Bien Pretty” hides out from her ex-boyfriend, she blames his contradictions on his new girlfriend:

Eddie, who taught me how to salsa, who lectured me night and day about human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, but never said a word about the rights of Black in Oakland, the kids of the Tenderloin, the women who shared his bed. Eduardo. My Eddie. That Eddie. With a blonde. He didn’t even have the decency to pick a woman of color.

Her characters are women who, over the span of just a few pages, learn who they are, contradict themselves (and realistically), display for the reader their otherwise secret growing pains, and take their first steps toward maturing into complex, imperfect women. They are women and girls who have been coddled, abused, ignored, loved, embarrassed; who have gone hungry, survived war, indulged in bad habits; who have run away or been left behind; and who never once mention “feminism” or give their survival any such label.

As a reader, I can only imagine how these three texts could inform each other: how Cisneros’s characters are fictionalized versions of the mothers and grandmothers from whom the writers of Colonize This! learned their unlabelled feminisms or other frameworks within which they fight; how Lorde puts into words the otherwise ethereal power of the erotic behind the sassiness of Cisneros’s women; how an intergenerational dialogue could have played out between the mixture of theory and pragmatism balanced by the younger women of Colonize This! and Audre Lorde, had she not died young before most of that younger generation came of age.

When I read texts like these, when I take notes in my head or on paper, when I xerox photos from library books that put into pictures what I have as a jumble of words and exclamation marks, I am trying to meld them together into a framework that I’m not positive exists yet, at least that I don’t know a word for. “Women of color feminism” is a mouthful, and doesn’t specify a space made nurturing for queer & trans people, or for corresponding analyses of ableism and classism. Womanism is often focused specifically on black women and often has religious undertones, though Alice Walker coined the term to be a broader analysis than feminism (as she (in)famously put it, “Womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender”). Chicanisma/xicanisma and indigenist feminisms are also understandably racially specific; anarcha-feminism all too often falls short on a sturdy race analysis. I have been hearing lately about a mama/mami-centered framework that rejects outright the label of feminism; this takes its guidance from the needs and successes of those within a community who play the nurturing and supporting role of mama/mami, whether or not they are physically mothers. I think there is potential in each of these frameworks, and want to see how they continue to come together.

I have had a quote from Audre Lorde’s essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language & Action” in the back of my head since I first read it 4 years ago, that “to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.” What she meant is that for people (and especially women) of color, queer people, trans or genderqueer people, the disabled, the working or nonworking poor, the young & the elderly, people within the intersections of those identities—each of our unexpected successes against the heterosexist, white supremacist system from which we’re fighting to break out, is a blow that was never part of the plan. In Lorde’s eyes, those very acts of survival need to be celebrated and carried on; this world does not intend for us to make anything of ourselves, and surely not to remain happy and healthy while we try.

With that quote as a starting point, I want to attach a name to this framework, perhaps survival feminism. Perhaps postcolonialist feminism has it covered. I want this to be a framework that centers those acts of survival; that doesn’t expect women to exist apart from their sons, brothers, or other male loved ones; that doesn’t alienate women from their roots through erasure or from their community through elitism; that expects people to have nonbinaried genders and is inherently queer; that lives hidden in margins and thrives in overlaps and intersections.